Tales of the Aggronaut

Old-Lady Suit

February 12, 2016 by Belghast

Best Intentions

I had psyched myself up yesterday to go off and do some raiding last night. Some friends of friends had graciously offered to drag me along with them for the first part of Heroic Hellfire Citadel. I thought to myself that this was an excellent opportunity, that could lead to gear and maybe even a moose at some point, so even though they raid PST, I figured I would make the good college try. The problem being my body is still conspiring against me. This is officially the sickest I have been in years, as we are now going on thirteen days for this crud. Admittedly my wife had something super similar weeks before we went to PAX and while she got over the bulk of it… almost a month later she still has the constant cough. The thing that is killing me at the moment is the sore throat, only exacerbated by the constant body shaking coughing fits and drainage. So by the time the raid was starting around 9:30 my time…. I was already taking NyQuil and planning to slip into bed. I politely begged off as best I could and if any of them are reading today… I sincerely thank them for the opportunity. One which I kinda hope will still be available when I am not feeling like shit.

The problem I am in with Belghast is the fact that my item level is artificially low, because there are four pieces of gear that I simply cannot afford to get rid of. I have the four piece normal Blackrock Foundry set, and every time I try and sim out swapping out of it for higher item level gear… it is a major dps loss. The problem being that I am playing a special snowflake class that will be going away in Legion. Gladiator just works strangely, and it feels like Blizzard inadvertently gave use the most perfect class set ever. The two piece bonus is “Shield Slam has a 8% Chance to Automatically Cast Shield Charge” which is massive, and helps fill in those spots where I could not normally have Shield Charge up for the damage bonuses. The four piece is essentially “Shield Charge increases the damage of Heroic Strike, Slam, and Revenge by an Additional 20%” which is the single best damage booster that I can get right now. So I simply cannot abandon this set bonus, and the only real option right now would be to try and find a Mythic Blackrock group so I could get the Mythic four piece set. Because of the way the Hellfire Dungeon set works… I can also squeeze in the two piece of that set giving me “Bonus Armor Increased by 145” which while not insane… is a decent dps boost since every point of armor translates to 2 attack power for Gladiator spec. So needless to say I am stuck in a corner where my 686 gear score does not exactly equate to my performance… but I don’t really have access to the upgrades that would actually help. I mean as much as I hate to see it go, I totally see why Blizzard is getting rid of this special snowflake spec. It is extremely hard to itemize for and gear for.

Madness and Cheese

So after getting frustrated that there was very little I could do to improve my lot in life on my Warrior, I ended up logging over into Elder Scrolls Online for some nice and peaceful questing. I actually managed to catch Solaria on at the same time, and I spent a little bit of time attempting to help her get started in crafting. The only problem being that during prime time it seems like all of the ore is heavily farmed down. Since I have the insane “see it from a distance” glow effect, I am wondering about dropping down to Betnikh and helping farm up a bunch of ore for her. She decided to go with a Heavy Armor Two-Handed Templar…. which was one of my favorite paths from alpha testing. It feels a little bit like a WoW Retribution Paladin in the burst damage department, and has some really high survival when running around questing. It also greatly simplifies the crafting, since Blacksmith can literally make everything they would need to use from the weapon to the armor. The problem there is Blacksmithing honestly seems to be the most useful profession, and as a result ore is always in high demand. I could in theory just pass over a bunch of bars, but she really needs the skill-ups from refining the bars right now, so I would be better served just going out and farming ore for her.

One of the things I had forgotten about Elder Scrolls Online was just how well written the quests are. I completed a sequence in Grahtwood where I ended up encountering my favorite of all Daedra… Sheogorath the Prince of Madness. You never know if he is going to attack you… or offer you cheese… and then attack you. What makes this sequence so great is the fact that I have tangled with Sheogorath in the past of this game. He remembers my interactions and even seems to comment based on my decisions…. in this completely unrelated quest line. The amount of time that they put into making sure that the dialog trees had little gems like this, is just awesome… and I am still really impressed by them when I find them. All of the content was designed knowing that your single character might be completing all three factions worth of it. There is just something warm and fuzzy about playing this game… and while at one point I was disappointed in it… I think most of that was really just me trying to make it into something that it was not. As a largely solo experience the game is exemplary, and honestly I look forward to trying to scramble enough people together to do a dungeon or two and see if that experience improved as well. Cheese for everyone!

Welcome Back System

February 11, 2016 by Belghast

Honey Coated Goodness

Yesterday the topic of Secret World came up on twitter, and as always I give my normal response of that I need to go back and play some more. This will forever be one of those games that I remember very fondly…. so long as I don’t really focus on the end game content and frustrations we felt there. As far as narrative storytelling… I have to say this game probably provided the best experiences I have ever seen in any MMO to date. The mixture of real world and game world puzzles, that required me to look things up in the provided in game browser…. which often lead to “fake” websites about in game companies… was just a level of integration I had not experienced and honestly have not since. The storyline itself was this wonderful blending of so much real world lore, that quite honestly… it blends so well into almost any modern fantasy genre. I remember thinking that this fertile ground should provide for plenty of additional adventures, and in truth it has. Since June of 2012 the game has released 13 major content updates called “Issues” and a handful of smaller packs, which is a far cry from the original goal of “monthly” content releases… but not horrible by any stretch of the imagination.

The problem is… the game has struggled to find an audience that is also willing to pay for the game. One of the best purchases I ever made was the original “Lifetime Subscription” that was available back at launch, that honestly was still available until recently. According to MMOWatcher this officially went off the market on February 5th, meaning that there will be no more new Grandmasters. The problem is…. the Grandmaster system is so amazingly good, that after my initial one time purchase… I have never NEEDED to give them any more money. I have this feeling that a lot of the folks who are actively playing are in this same boat. Now they cranked up the benefits of a monthly membership, because quite honestly…. Funcom has been hurting for a long while. Once again however as a Grandmaster I am “grandfathered” into this system… but the perks are pretty insane.

A 30% increase to all Experience earned. (This replaces the Time Accelerator)

A 50% boost to all Black Bullions gained.

20% extra capacity for Black Bullions and Marks of the Pantheon.

8-hour Mission Cooldowns.

18-hour Raid Lockout Timers.

2 Lockout Timer Resets every 30 days. This item resets all active Cooldowns (Missions/Raids/Scenarios).

A 10% storewide discount for everything in the item shop (20% for Grand Masters).

1200 Bonus Points every 30 days.

Free Anima Leaps!

Then in addition to this there is a reward system that you get various really cool items available to you at fixed points in your subscription much like the Final Fantasy XIV or Everquest II veteran reward systems. This is also on top of getting the monthly items, that have been acrueing on my account since launch. Once again as a Grandmaster… I just get all of them unlocked at once. Some of the rewards available are.

30 Days: Anima effect on sprint and faction jackets
60 Days: Hoverboard and Panoptic Core in faction colors
90 Days: Ur-Draug pet and an additional Agartha Conduit
180 Days: Portable bank and a baller costume
360 Days: Weapon skins and a scooter mount

The Challenge

The problem with being away from a game like The Secret World this long however is that I quite honestly have no idea where to start. I know I completed Issues 1-4, and 6… but all of the ones I missed I have no idea where they even start. Normally speaking in a traditional wow-style MMO you can simply run around until you see exclamations over the top of NPC heads. However in TSW almost every quest can be repeated as many times as you like, so as a result you end up with a sea of possibilities, and several years later I have no clue where to even start. I’ve talked about this before, but games really need a better “welcome back” system, that presents the players with a guess at what they were doing last, and also presents them with five or so items that they should consider doing. Initially I had this idea of starting a new character, like I do in so many other games when trying to ease back into them. The problem being…. that I am already capped on the number of characters I have access to. During the 2014 Extra Life I created the horribly named “Belstream” to stream the Secret World newbie experience, and even then… I have no clue where I left off with him.

The challenge is that I don’t really WANT to play an Alt… I would prefer to just keep trucking along on my Templar main. However the level of investment that I will have to make to get into the game… sort out what I did and where to start doing again…. is ultimately want keeps me logging in and then after futzing with my wardrobe a bit, logging right back out. Similar to Everquest II, the other big challenge for me is sorting through my inventory… which is full of so much crap that I can no longer recognize if it is even useful. All of these candy colored icons mean nothing to me right now, and the fact that I am wearing epic gear in most of my slots makes me doubt if they are even useful to upgrade anything with. I would break stuff down… but honestly I would even have to look up how you did that again. I have the desire to play, but right now there is entirely too much “friction” standing in the way of me doing that. I realize Funcom more than likely lacks the funds to devote to new systems, but this at least is a huge challenge for me. I guess I could simply start by looking up the patch notes for Issue 5 and then going forward from there, trying to go find the quest chain starter for each additional Issue that I missed. But this is the point where I ask myself…. do I care enough to devote a few hours of research, or do I just want to spend my limited evening hours playing something else that I remember how to play?

FPS Evolved Genre

February 10, 2016 by Belghast

Thoughts for Motiga

One of the aspects of Pax South 2016 that felt strange for me, was the complete and total lack of Motiga and Gigantic. I cannot fully express how much of my experience this game was in 2015. I had a great time hanging out with the Motiga crew thanks to Lonrem brokering a connection, and then kept dragging people to the booth to play Gigantic. It felt like the sort of MOBA experience I had been looking for. When I played a tanky character, it felt like playing an MMO tank. When I played a ranged character, it felt like playing a really good ranged shooter. I feel like hands down they were the belle of the ball last year, and when I heard about their layoffs in december, and the fact that they were not on the roster for 2016… I started to get concerned. Since coming back from Pax last year I have been lucky enough to have access to all of the alpha and beta events, but I have to admit I didn’t really play much of it. For the longest time it just played lousy on my then Geforce 750ti video card…. and now that I have at least upgraded to a 960 I am wondering if maybe it would perform a little better. As of yesterday however I am really starting to worry for the folks at the company, because according to a Gamasutra article the just underwent some pretty significant staff reduction in a last ditch attempt to get more funding to finish the game.

Now that the NDA has lifted I don’t have to worry quite so much about how I talk about Gigantic. I really need to reinstall the game and see what its current state happens to be. The biggest problem that the game had was that its back end systems were not quite as polished as the front end game play. Matchmaking was a big issue, and the fact that in order to get valuable feeling matches… you realistically needed to hang out on testing ventrilo and and form some sort of a custom game. The last time I attempted to boot up the game I sat in a matchmaking queue for thirty minutes and then finally gave up. My friend Rae apparently has played it more recently, but ran into a pretty elitist player base… with her catching shit for not doing the right thing at the right time. This is one of those games that is so damned close to really good…. but I worry that maybe they missed their window by a year. I’ve always said that in order for this game to be really popular it needed to be first to market, since it is essentially launching an untested IP. The awesome thing is though, that the characters…. well… for lack of a better term have character. They are interesting and are animated in a way that they spring to life. This game has what League of Legends has… but so many other games in the MOBA genre have lacked… personality. I really hope that they can pull this off, but as always I worry about the folks that were just let go. This game deserves its time in the sun, and I think it will flourish on consoles…. quite possibly more so than on the PC that already has a fairly entrenched first person MOBA genre. The critical date however is that they HAVE to beat Overwatch to launch, or they are pretty much toast. Even thought those two games are vastly different in feel… players are still mentally lumping them all together in this “fps evolved” genre of folks taking the FPS template and doing new things with it.

Overwatch Beta Returns

Speaking of the 500 lb gorilla that Gigantic has to beat to market… as of yesterday the Overwatch Beta is back on, and with it has also returned much gnashing of teeth as more folks failed to get in. At this point I am pretty much resigned that I will not likely get to play until open beta testing at some point. For a brief period of time I thought that maybe I had access, because in the launcher the install button suddenly started showing up for me. The only problem being that it was grayed out, and not clickable. I am guessing this was a temporary glitch because later that evening when I popped into WoW to do my garrison gold farming… it was back to hiding the install button again. The truth is… even if I had beta access I probably would not be playing it much. My recent return to Elder Scrolls Online has taught me that… maybe I am just not a good beta candidate these days. I absolutely blame the almost two years of regularly ESO testing for my diminished desire to play after getting to the veteran ranks. I quite literally had burned myself out on all of the newbie content, so that the thought of alting my way through it again just felt painful. I poured my heart and soul into that testing experience, because I wanted that game to be the best damned game it could be… and honestly judging it today through very clear eyes… I think it turned out pretty great.

I want to be able to walk into Overwatch and have the game feel free and exciting, and be able to experience the new player rush along with everyone else. Sure I would love to be able to play the game when the whim hits me right now, but I am not going to be the sort of hard core tester and bug reporter that they really need right now. In this sort of game, balance and gameplay statistics are key… and they need a sheer volume of data to sift through to be able to shape their design decisions. So for me… who is going to maybe play the game once a month… I am not exactly a great resource and if you replaced me with someone who is going to stream the game every night… you would be far better off in the end. I’ve developed this aversion to playing games before they are officially released. Now granted… I still do regularly…. but I have begun to learn my lesson. Torment: Tides of Numenera for example is absolutely available to me to test because I backed the project…. but I have zero desire right now to do so. I want to play the finished version of the game, when it is “ready for primetime” and not have to sift through crippling bugs. Maybe my tolerance for “broken games” is less than it used to be… or maybe there are just so damned many things that I want to be playing that spending my time on an unfinished product feels like a waste. In any case… I am a bad beta tester, and will continue to be super happy for those who are getting invited and enjoying their time playing games like Overwatch.

Maybe I Don’t Hate Elves?

February 9, 2016 by Belghast

The Thalmor

eso 2016-02-08 19-37-57-69

Today I am feeling a bit more stable, and as a result going to attempt work. I think I could probably use another day of rest, but in truth… yesterday I rescheduled meetings for today… and I don’t want to go through the hassle of trying to go in and reschedule them again. My throat is still insanely sore from all of the coughing, and my eyes were matted shut this morning… but in truth other than these things I am doing considerably better. My eyes are actually clear again instead of the red irritated mess that they have been recently. I also noticed that during the day yesterday apart from a bit of a nap… I actually felt like playing games again. During most of the weekend… I honestly spent more time staring at the screen than I actually did doing anything. I continued my journey into the Aldmeri Dominion campaign on my now Veteran Rank 2 character…. roughly half of the way to rank 3. Throughout the course of the day I managed to work my way around the map unlocking pretty much everything but the handful of Dolmen like the one pictured above. The problem with playing during what is normally work hours… is that there simply aren’t that many people around able to help you out. While I can struggle through most world boss encounters thanks to the hax of Green Dragon Blood. I have heard that it has technically been nerfed several times… but it is still enough of a self heal that I can struggle through most fights on my own.

The harsh realization I had while playing Aldmeri content is that maybe I don’t actually hate the High Elves or Aldmer as much as I though I did? In past games I honestly went out of my way to kill the High Evles when I saw them… but I am coming to realize that these were the Thalmor, and not necessarily representative of the High Elves as a whole. So pretty much all I was seeing was this extremist wing of the elves, that are just as horrible to their own people as they are to anyone else. I mean I have always liked the Bosmer and their Green Pact… I mean who doesn’t think Cannibal elves are awesome? Then there are the Khajiit, and you have to be a horrible ass to not like them. It is awesome seeing them in a light that is not as constant comic relief, even though they are absolutely right up there with the Argonians for most oppressed race of Tamriel. So while I expected to like the occasional merchant and small folk in this campaign… I did not expect to really like the leaders. The Canonreeves and Battlereeves have for the most part been awesome…. as has Queen Aywren herself. I am actually enjoying helping them turn the tide in the battle against the Maormer and the Veiled Heritance.

Epic Battles

eso 2016-02-08 15-12-44-05

Hands down the best part of the zone was the final fight for Firsthold. During this sequence you have to actually breach a number of Oblivion gates, as you push into the Refuge of Dread and try and sever the ties of Mehrunes Dagon to our plane. The irony is… were it any OTHER Elder Scrolls game… I would probably be completing the quests to HELP out Mehrunes Dagon because I would almost certainly be rewarded with a spiffy weapon. Sadly I took zero screenshots while in the Refuge of Dread, so instead you are getting a random dungeon screenshot. That is just how enthralled I was by that sequence of quests, that I kept wanting to move the story forward and get to the final culmination of the zone…. which itself was an equally epic battle. What makes it even cooler is that immediately following the conclusion of Auridon… we are thrust into yet another epic sequence as we try and win back the town of Haven in Grahtwood from the Jackdaw Pirates who have taken it over. I know it is going to shock Tam that I am saying that I actually kinda like the High Elves… but I have to admit it. Sure I like working for the Khajiit or Bosmer slightly better…. but the sad part is that we apparently only get to see the assholes in the form of the Thalmor when we are outside of the Summerset Isles.

All of this said… I still feel a much greater pull to the Daggerfall or Ebonheart Pact. I do have to say I really am enjoying questing through the Aldmeri areas however, in part because this was the last content to go into the game… and also the content I spent the least amount of time playing. I feel though that once I finish leveling through it… enough time might have passed for me to be able to enjoy the Ebonheart areas again. Largely it is just the Stonefalls area that tends to drag on… and if I can ever make it through that area I will be perfectly fine because then I am mostly into undiscovered territory again. I have to admit I am having a lot of fun, but I am mostly playing as a solo player. If you too are playing ESO on the PC, feel free to throw a friend invite to @Belghast my root account. It would be nice to at least have some folks to chat back and forth with while I am playing. Since I still don’t have much of a voice, and it is actually somewhat painful to talk… I am avoiding voice chat like the plague. Otherwise I would be sitting on our teamspeak server, and at least listening to the others as they are playing Warframe. At some point soon I need to poke my head back into that game, but the mood just hasn’t hit me. I also similarly need to play some more Destiny, but I have been spending most of my time downstairs on the couch and not near the PS4. I have to say… it feels pretty good to have things to talk about… other than just how horrible it is to be sick.